Perhaps one of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about in my years of Biblical Studies is the issue of the New Testament’s use of Old Testament prophecies. Like most people, I grew up with the general assumption that “prophecy” basically meant “prediction,” and that in regard to a number of Old Testament prophecies, that there were a number of “prophecy-predictions” about the coming Messiah that the Jews held onto for hundreds and hundreds of years until the coming of Jesus. Thus, when he came, he “fulfilled” these centuries-old prophecies in the sense that those predictions finally came true.
That view would lend itself to questions in my high school Bible class and Sunday school like, “Well gee, how could the Jews have missed Jesus as the Messiah? That prediction in Hosea 11:1 (“Out of Egypt I called my son”) came true when Jesus came back to Galilee after he and his parents fled to Egypt for awhile!” Or “How could the Jews not see that Isaiah 53 was describing Jesus’ crucifixion 500 years ahead of time?” Those questions boggled my mind—how could the Jews have missed it all? It was all so obvious!
Well, to get to the point, they missed it because those prophecies weren’t so obvious, because that kind of assumption about what prophecy is is basically wrong. And that is why, in my more than twenty years of Biblical Studies, I have been fascinated by the topic of the New Testament’s use of Old Testament prophecies. Understanding just what prophecy is and also how the New Testament writers were using Old Testament prophecy in their claims that it was fulfilled in the life of Christ made so much of it actually understandable.
For that reason, I am going to start a blog series this fall in which I discuss various instances in the Gospels where Old Testament prophecies are quoted and claimed to have been fulfilled in Christ. The fact is, if all you assume is that they were predictions of Jesus from long ago, then you are simply going to miss a whole lot of what that Gospel writer is trying to get across. To be blunt, they weren’t treating Old Testament prophecies like they were predictions from Nostradamus. They were doing something much more creative and genius than that.
So What Was Prophecy in the Old Testament?
The first thing to realize is that the Old Testament prophets were not in the business of making far-off predictions that wouldn’t transpire until hundreds and hundreds of years later. They were in the business of speaking God’s message to their audience back there and then. In short, the message of the prophet spoke directly to the situation of that prophet’s audience at the time, and therefore, it had to mean something to them at that time.
Now, if you take the time to really sit down and read all the Old Testament prophets, you’ll realize that all of them pretty much had the same kind of message. Here is my summarization of that prophetic message in the Old Testament prophets in three sentences: You all are sinning and violating the Mosaic covenant because you are going after idols, committing spiritual adultery, and oppressing the poor and needy! If you don’t repent, turn back to YHWH, and stay faithful to the covenant, you are going to suffer judgment, your country will be destroyed, and you will go into exile! But YHWH is going to use the exile to purify you as a people and a remnant will come out of the exile, and somehow, through that remnant, God is going to eventually restore His entire creation and bless all nations.
That’s it in a nutshell. Now, that basic message was tailored and tweaked to address the specific historical situation that each prophet was a part of (Isaiah was addressing 8th century BC Judah; Jeremiah was addressing late 6th-early 5th century Judah; Zechariah was addressing the post-exilic late 5th century BC returnees from exile, etc.), but most of the prophets follow that pattern: Indictment of Sin; Call to Repentance; Prophecy of Coming Judgment; Promise of Future Restoration.
The second thing to keep in mind is the issue of why we even have the Old Testament prophetic books we have. For example, in Jeremiah 28 we are told that Hananiah the prophet prophesied that Judah should rebel against Babylon because YHWH would break the yoke of Babylon from the neck of Judah. Jeremiah, though, prophesied that if they rebelled again Babylon and tried to break the yoke of Babylon rule, that God would replace it with an iron yoke and that the city and Temple would be destroyed and Judah would be sent into exile.
So, why do we have a Book of Jeremiah and not a Book of Hananiah? The answer is obvious: Jeremiah’s prophecies came to pass, whereas Hananiah’s prophecies didn’t. Even though Jeremiah was imprisoned and persecuted at the time (whereas Hananiah was honored), Jeremiah was eventually proven to be a true prophet of YHWH and Hananiah was proven to be a false prophet. Therefore, since Jeremiah was a true prophet of YHWH, his works deserved to be preserved, whereas the works of the false prophet Hananiah were destroyed. If what he prophesied had not come true at the time, he would have been considered a false prophet and they wouldn’t have kept his prophecies.
The same can be said for all the Old Testament prophets. We have those books of prophecy because their prophecies were understood to have come true and thus those prophets were vindicated in the eyes of the Jews as being true prophets of YHWH. If those prophets prophesied that certain things would happen, but they didn’t happen within a reasonable amount of time, their works would not have been preserved. The Jews would not have held on to a “prophecy-prediction” for 500 years, “Hey, when is this gosh darn prediction going to happen?”
Why All That is Important to Realize…and what “Fulfillment” Means
All this is crucial to realize if we are to understand the Gospel writers’ use of various Old Testament prophecies, and in particular their claim that they were “fulfilled” with various actions of Jesus. When the Gospel writers were quoting from the Old Testament, they weren’t cherry-picking random verses and they weren’t picking verses that the Jews had been holding onto for 500 years, thinking, “When is this going to come true?” I’m convinced the Gospel writers picked the verses they picked because they knew full well what they were about and what the original context of those prophecies were and they wanted their readers to interpret various episodes in the life of Jesus in light of those prophecies.
In that respect, the word “fulfillment” shouldn’t be seen in the sense of a prediction coming true. It should be seen in the sense that in Christ the plans and purposes that God had been slowly bringing about throughout the life of ancient Israel were coming to their full fruition and climax. The visual example I often give my students is of a cup that is being filled up with water. On the cup, there are various lines drawn on it. Taking the picture here as an example, imagine that bottom line representing God’s covenant with Abraham, the next line representing the Mosaic covenant, the next line representing the Davidic covenant. We could put more lines that represent things like the exile and the return from exile. The brim of the cup is the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. When the cup is filled then God’s purposes in regard to His actions within the life of Israel have been completed…and, if you will, salvation can now “overflow” to the whole world.
When we go back to God’s covenant with Abraham, there were three basic promises God made: (1) He’d make Abraham’s name great, (2) From Abraham, He’d make a great nation, and (3) Through that nation, all nations would be blessed. That was the “plan” God put in place to deal with sin and redeem His creation. Everything in the Old Testament somehow was building up to the fulfillment of God’s purposes. Therefore, when the Gospel writers claim that certain Old Testament verses are “fulfilled” in Christ, they are essentially saying, “You know that event back then to which this verse is referring? Back then, that played a small part in fulfilling God’s plan, but in Christ, God’s purposes that we see at work in part in that past event have now been fulfilled.
Or to put it in even simpler terms, the Gospel writers are saying, “Jesus is like that, but bigger!” For that reason, whenever a Gospel writer quotes an Old Testament prophecy, it is important to go back to the original verse and ask, “What did the prophecy in question mean in its original context?” And then, after you’ve done that, you should go back to the Gospel passage in which that Old Testament prophecy is quoted and then ask, “Given that original context and meaning, what is the Gospel writer doing with it? How does that original Old Testament context impact the reading of the Gospel passage?
Doing this is a fascinating exercise, and I’ve found it reveals a much deeper meaning and understanding to what the Gospel writers are conveying in their Gospels. Reading the fulfillment passages in the Gospels as if they were nothing more than centuries-old predictions finally coming true is, in my opinion, a very shallow reading of the Gospels.
In the next few posts, I will go through a number of instances in which the Gospel writers claim that Jesus fulfills various Old Testament prophecies and I will discuss the original context of those prophecies and then how I see that original context impacts our understanding of what the Gospel writers are saying. I’ll start by looking at Isaiah 53 and the Suffering Servant.
But that will be for next time.
Thanks. In general, I agree with your insights.
Some ideas I have come across that you may wish to consider is that I think in some cases the words “fulfill” and “destroy” when applied to Scripture were and are rabbinic idioms found many times in the Jewish Mishnah meaning “to correctly interpret” and “to incorrectly interpret” and that a prophecy can have multiple fulfillments that echo previous ones through time, that is, just because a prophecy was fulfilled in some way close to the time it was given does not necessarily mean it is “one and done” but that it can be fulfilled again and that both or even multiple fulfillments are all valid.
This should be an interesting counter-point to another blogger I’ve respected (whom I had gotten to know through a Christian forum) but eventually declared himself agnostic because he found the prophecies inconsistent or unrealized.
Hi Joel. I am conducting a survey of America’s conservative Christian scholars and apologists on the authorship of the Gospels. I wanted to email it to you but I can’t find a “contact” button on your blog, so here is the survey:
Dear Conservative New Testament scholar or apologist,
1. Do you agree with this statement by conservative NT scholar Richard Bauckham that a significant majority of NT scholars rejects the eyewitness/associate eyewitness authorship of the Gospels:
“The argument of this book [“Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”]–that the texts of our Gospels are close to the eyewitness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus–runs counter to almost all recent scholarship. As we have indicated from time to time, the prevalent view is that a long period of oral transmission in the churches intervened between whatever the eyewitnesses said and the Jesus traditions as they reached the Evangelists [the authors of the Gospels]. No doubt the eyewitnesses started the process of oral tradition, but it passed through many retellings, reformulations, and expansions before the Evangelists themselves did their own editorial work on it.” p. 240
Circle one: Yes No
2. If you agree with Bauckham’s statement that “almost all recent scholarship” believes that the texts of our Gospels are NOT close to the eyewitness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus, do you believe that this scholarly consensus is due to an objective evaluation of the evidence, or due to a bias against the supernatural, as some conservative Christian apologists allege (see here)?
Circle one: Evidence Bias
3. If you believe that the scholarly consensus on the authorship of the Gospels is due to a bias against the supernatural, how would you explain the fact that most Roman Catholic scholars, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and many moderate Protestant scholars such as NT Wright, who every much believe in the supernatural and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, also reject or question the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels? (see here)
___________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you very much,
Gary
Gary, the way you’ve worded your questionnaire seems misleading to me. You don’t provide the context for Wright’s statements. I’m sorry but that comes off as slightly misleading to me, seeing as how Wright’s statements in this regard weren’t made in a vacuum. I think you’re trying to make the issue more simple than it really is.
If you’ve read Bauckham’s book jacket carefully you’ll notice a blurb by NT Wright which reads:
“The question of whether the Gospels are based on eyewitness accounts has long been controversial. Richard Bauckham, in a characteristic tour de force, draws on his unparalleled knowledge of the world of the first Christians to argue not only that the Gospels do indeed contain eyewitness testimony but that their first readers would certainly have recognized them as such. This book is a remarkable piece of detective work, resulting in a fresh and vivid approach to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of well-known problems and passages.”
So based on this and my reading of over 30 of Wright’s other books on Jesus and the NT, Wright believes a strong case *can* be made that the gospels *were* written early, and by eyewitnesses, but that this obviously cannot be proven with 100% certainty. In the clip you post on your site and quote above Wright is making the true and important distinction that *who* wrote the gospels isn’t as important as the fact that:
“The portrait of Jesus we find in the canonical gospels makes sense within the world of Palestine in the 20s and 30s of the first century. Above all, it makes coherent sense in itself. The Jesus who emerges is thoroughly believable as a figure of history, even though the more we look at him, the more we feel once more that we may be staring into the sun.”
Addressing this point more fully he says in an article for BeliefNet titled “Can We Trust the Gospels?”:
“What is more, those four canonical gospels must all have been written by about AD 90 at the very latest. (I am inclined to think they are probably a lot earlier than that, but they cannot be later.) They are known and referred to by Christian writers in the first half of the second century, long before anyone begins to discuss the material we now know from Nag Hammadi. And they incorporate, and are based on, sources both oral and written which go back a lot earlier, sources from the time when not only most of Jesus’s followers were still alive and active within the early Christian movement, but when plenty of others–bystanders, opponents, officials–were still around, aware of the new movement as it was growing, and ready to challenge or contradict tales that were gaining currency. Palestine is a small country. In a world without print and electronic media, people were eager to hear and eager to pass on stories about anyone and anything out of the ordinary. The chances are, as John suggests at the end of his gospel, that there was in fact far more material available about Jesus than any one of the gospel writers had space to put down. Source material must have been plentiful. The central features of Jesus’s life and work must have been well known. As one of the early preachers says, these things were not done in a corner.
“Is the Gospels’ Portrait of Jesus Reliable?
“It is not as easy to reconstruct the sources of the gospels as has sometimes been imagined. In particular, I have never shared the enthusiasm for a source widely referred to as “Q,” which many suppose lies behind Matthew and Luke. If such a source ever existed, it is tenuous in the extreme (though this hasn’t stopped intrepid souls from making the attempt first to reconstruct it and then to use that reconstruction as a measuring stick over against Matthew and Luke themselves). It is even more shaky to suggest, as some have done in recent times, that such a source represents an entire strand of early Christianity, with its own beliefs and way of life. It is much more likely, in my judgment, that the gospel writers were able to draw on a bewildering variety of sources, many of them oral (in a world where oral reports were prized more highly than written ones), AND MANY OF THEM FROM EYEWITNESSES (my emph).”.
“This doesn’t mean, of course, that everything the gospels say is thereby automatically validated. Assessing their historical worth can be done, if at all, only by the kind of painstaking historical work which I and others have attempted at some length. I simply record it as my conviction that the four canonical gospels, broadly speaking, present a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth which is firmly grounded in real history. As the late historian John Roberts, author of a monumental History of the World (1980), sums it up, “the gospels need not be rejected; much more inadequate evidence about far more intractable subjects has often to be employed [in writing history].” The portrait of Jesus we find in the canonical gospels makes sense within the world of Palestine in the 20s and 30s of the first century. Above all, it makes coherent sense in itself. The Jesus who emerges is thoroughly believable as a figure of history, even though the more we look at him, the more we feel once more that we may be staring into the sun.” (https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/2006/08/can-we-trust-the-gospels.aspx)
In his book *The Original Jesus* Wright says:
“The crucial thing to say about this new theory is that the argument for the substantial historicity and accuracy of the Gospels never depended on their dating, anyway. True, lots of scholars have argued as though that was the case, with ‘radical’ scholars dating the Gospels late (and so darkly suggesting that they were all unreliable) and ‘conservative’ scholars dating them early (and so brightly suggesting that everything in them was taken down by eyewitnesses at the scene). But this is actually a mistake. The historicity and accuracy of the Gospels depends on our putting together the whole jigsaw of the first century, with Judaism and early Christianity side by side (and indeed confusingly intertwined with each other), and with Jesus as the middle term straddling both. The historicity of the Gospels depends, not on when they were written, but the historical plausibility of the picture they describe.”
So Wright, while believing the gospels were probably written by eyewitnesses, says that their veracity doesn’t depend upon their authorship or their dates of authorship but whether the portrait of Jesus they give us is plausible or not, which Wright argues is the case.
But to answer your questions.
1. Yes, Bauckham’s statement is correct. A large number of NT scholars do not believe the gospels were written by eyewitnesses.
2. Many of these scholars take the fundamentalist Christian view of the scriptures for granted and then reject this view. What they’re rejecting thus isn’t the scriptures themselves but the fundamentalist caricature of them. Unfortunately they seem not to know the difference. Of course part of their rejection does in fact stem from their a priori bias against the supernatural and precommitment to a purely materialistic universe. That and their fundamentalist approach to scripture is why many of them reject it.
3. As for why conservative RCC scholars don’t get hung up on the gospels being written by eyewitnesses, it may be because the RCC holds scripture and tradition on an equal plane and because they haven’t bought into the popular fundamentalist views regarding the inerrancy of scripture. Catholics have never fallen into the inerrancy trap, that is, that every word of the gospels MUST be inerrant or the whole thing collapses. As for why Wright can admit that we honestly don’t know who wrote the gospels yet still hold them to be reliable, I just gave you two lengthy quotes explaining his views. Wright, while personally believing that a good case can be made for the gospels being written relatively early and by eyewitnesses, hasn’t been distracted from seeing what’s more important: namely, that the portrait of Jesus they give us is reliable. So in the end their precise date/authorship isn’t important.
Pax.
Lee.
Hi Lee. Thank you for your detailed reply. Since I am not a regular follower of this blog, would you kindly give me some information about you? If you are a scholar, apologist, or even a blogger, I will be happy to include your comments in my survey. Could you give me a link to your blog or other credentials for reference? Thanks.
Wright said above, “not only that the Gospels do indeed contain eyewitness testimony but that their first readers would certainly have recognized them as such.”
You said: “So Wright, while believing the gospels were probably written by eyewitnesses, says that their veracity doesn’t depend upon their authorship or their dates of authorship but whether the portrait of Jesus they give us is plausible or not, which Wright argues is the case.”
No where in your quotes does Wright claim that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by the close associates of eyewitnesses. He simply believes that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony and suggests that the evangelists obtained some of this information directly from eyewitnesses.
I see a big distinction.
I fully acknowledge that there MAY be eyewitness testimony within the Gospels. i am not disputing that. I am strictly discussing authorship. Many if not most NT scholars reject or at least question the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels. NT Wright does not reject the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels but he is on the record saying that neither he nor anyone else knows who the authors of the Gospels were. To me that is consistent with my claim that NT Wright questions the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels.
Joel, would you mind taking the survey?
1. Yes, Bauckham’s statement is right…most RECENT scholars reject that notion.
2-3. No, I don’t think that rejection is entirely objective. It doesn’t have much to do with some sort of “bias against the supernatural.” I think much of it amount to a “flavor of the month” group think. Example: Source Criticism–Can we see different kinds of material in the Pentateuch? Sure. But you can’t go much further than that…but source critics often do go too far, and it becomes circular logic and hopelessly speculative.
3. Bottom line: Scholars generally agree Mark was 60s-70s, Matthew/Luke were 70s-80s, John was 90s. With the Synoptics, 30-35 years ISN’T a long time between the event and the writing of the gospels. And M,M,L weren’t made up out of whole cloth at that time. They were compilations of what had been proclaimed and taught about Jesus for those previous 30-35 years. So, I agree with Bauckham that they very likely have their roots in actual eyewitness accounts–but they were shaped into their current form/narrative 30+ years later.
Thank you, Joel. Your position has been added to the survey.
https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/three-questions-every-conservative-new-testament-scholar-should-answer/
HA! You have me in the “top 40”? Well alright then!
Wright believes a good case can be made for their being written by eyewitnesses, or at the least that they contain eyewitness testimony, but admits that nobody can prove it the way you can prove Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you but you seem to be arguing that if the gospels weren’t written by eyewitnesses that this somehow jeopardizes their credibility/reliability or somehow calls it into question.
No other plausible authors have ever been put forward. And if the gospels really were anonymous, what are the odds that all the churches across the Roman Empire would label the shortest one Mark, or the one that beings with the Logos prologue John? Or the one that begins with a genealogy Matthew? Why label Mark’s gospel after a disciple of an apostle and not that apostle himself? Why not label Mark “Tthe Gospel of Peter”? That would’ve given it that much more clout in antiquity, after all, and anyway, the earliest tradition says it was based on Peter’s testimony.
But again, the truth of Christianity doesn’t stand or fall on the gospels being written by eyewitnesses. A source can still be accurate even if not written by eyewitnesses. The truth of Christianity stands or falls on whether Jesus was actually resurrected or not, as all four gospels insist was the case.
As for my credentials, I don’t really have any as a scholar or apologist. I had a blog but let it lapse a few years ago. So my comments might not work for your survey.
Lee.
Again, I am not debating the historical reliability of the Gospels. I am only talking about authorship.
Christians have various reasons for believing that the Gospels contain eyewitness information and therefore that they are reliable sources of information about Jesus. Here is the position of the Catholic Church:
“They [the Gospels] were anonymously written. In fact most scholars today do not believe that the evangelists were eyewitnesses for the simple reason that their chronology of events and theological interpretations are different. The titles of the gospels were added in the second century and very well could designate the authority behind the finished gospel or the one who wrote one of the main sources of the gospel. The [Roman Catholic] Church takes no official stance on their authorship. It is important to understand that the Church by its authority and the guidance of the Holy Spirit canonized these four gospels over many others that were circulated and read in the early centuries.” –“About Catholics” website
If someone believes that the Gospels contain eyewitness information and are therefore reliable sources of historical information that is certainly a defensible position. However, I believe that it is an indefensible position to claim that most NT scholars doubt or question the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels due to an anti-supernatural bias., as so many conservative bloggers claim on the internet. How is this possible when so many Roman Catholic and moderate Protestant scholars, who do believe in the supernatural and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, also reject the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels?
Well, I think you are conflating “conservative” with “fundamentalist.”
Do you consider William Lane Craig to be a fundamentalist? I have collected a long list of quotes from prominent conservative Christians on this issue:
https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/do-conservative-christians-allege-that-the-majority-scholarly-position-on-the-authorship-and-dating-of-the-gospels-is-due-to-a-bias-against-the-supernatural/
Aside from Craig, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any of the others. I question whether or not they really as “prominent.” But hey, you consider me in the “top 40”! To quote Inigo Montoya, “That word…I do not think it means what you think it means!” haha
I didn’t claim that “prominent” conservative Christians were making this claim. Here is my claim as stated on my post:
“I assert that a significant number of evangelicals and conservative Protestants allege that the above majority scholarly positions on the above issues [the eyewitness authorship and the dating of the Gospels] are due to a bias against the supernatural.”
That is why I am doing the survey. I want to see if lay evangelical and conservative Protestants are getting this idea from evangelical and conservative Protestant apologists and scholars or they have invented this canard from whole cloth. I haven’t collected enough data yet to determine which is this case.
Look at your previous comment: “I have collected a long list of quotes from prominent conservative Christians on this issue.” That is what I was referring to. Okay, I’ve heard of J. Warner Wallace. Haven’t read him.
You’ve never heard of J. Warner Wallace, the author of “Cold Case Christianity”??
J. Warner Wallace, conservative Christian apologist, author of “Cold Case Christianity”: “When visiting with Dan Wallace, Greg Koukl and I asked him about the skepticism on the part of people like Bart Ehrman related to early dating. We asked Wallace if there was some specific manuscript evidence that inclined people to deny the early dating of the Gospel accounts. Wallace said there was no such evidence. We then asked why people continued to deny the early dating if, in fact, we were continuing to find early fragments and there was no contrary manuscript evidence. It turns out that the late dating of the gospels is due primarily to a denial of supernaturalism.”
I’ve added comments by conservative theologian Norman Geisler, evangelical NT scholar Peter Williams, and Biola professor and theologian JP Moreland. Surely you have heard of these prominent conservative Christians.
Geisler and Moreland, yes. Craig Keener is a legit NT scholar.
But IMO there still is a difference between actual NT scholars and Christian apologists, or even theologians/philosophers.
Nevertheless, yes, there are a few well-known names.
Okay, I see what you’re saying. The RCC takes no “official;” stand. Fine.
I think the NT itself is subjected to more intellectual scrutiny by skeptics than almost any other book or collection of texts anywhere. Though it’s been subjected to study, the Quran, for example, certainly hasn’t been dissected nearly as much.
Why has the NT been subjected to such scrutiny? Why has it been dissected in every way possible? I would argue because it makes supernatural claims. That, and because it’s the basic set of texts for the world’s largest religion and its precepts/teaching form the cornerstone of much of Western civilization.
Because so many modern scholars *are* skeptics or atheists is one reason why, unlike other ancient texts, the NT is presumed to be fantasy until it can be proved genuine/accurate.
The 18th c. enlightenment skeptics like Reimarus were trying to free Jesus from the rigid orthodoxy of Christian tradition. Certainly the aim of scholars like the Jesus Seminar Fellows was to separate the “Jesus of history” from the “Christ of faith” because they decided before they began that the two were necessarily incompatible. Founding Fellow Robert Funk stated as much.
It may be too broad a brush to say ALL NT scholars work from such biases but many have/do.
That’s just my opinion.
Pax.
Lee.
When it comes to the issue of the historical reliability of the NT, yes, I agree–there is definitely an “anti-supernatural bias. But when it comes to simply the authorship of M, M, L, and J–I don’t think it as strong.
“Because so many modern scholars *are* skeptics or atheists is one reason why, unlike other ancient texts, the NT is presumed to be fantasy until it can be proved genuine/accurate”
I always find this conservative Christian allegation very odd. The overwhelming majority of Bible scholars are professing Christians. Other than Bart Ehrman and Gerd Luedemann how many other atheist scholars can you name?? I would bet that one can count the number of atheist Bible scholars on one hand!
“It may be too broad a brush to say ALL NT scholars work from such biases but many have/do.”
This is exactly the claim that I want to expose. What proof do you have that “many” scholars work from a bias? Even if we add in all the guys in the Jesus Seminar (even Habermas states that this groups constitutes only a couple dozen scholars) to our list of “skeptics”, we are still at a very small number of scholars!
The truth is that most Bible scholars are Christians. The truth is that most Bible scholars believe in the supernatural. So where is the evidence that “many” scholars work from a bias against the supernatural as the reason why they reject the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels and the early dating of the Gospels?
I believe that this is a canard.
Yes, Bart Ehrman and Gerd Luedemann have a bias against the supernatural and this is why they don’t believe in the miracle claims of the Bible. But that has nothing to do with their positions on the authorship or dating of the Gospels. As an example, even Ehrman believes that it is entirely possible that the Gospel of Mark was written prior to 70 CE. And even if you refuse to believe this about Ehrman, what about all the Roman Catholic and moderate Protestant scholars who reject the eyewitness/early dating of the Gospels? What is their reason? A bias against the supernatural??
Conservative Christian bloggers and some apologists are “poisoning the well”. Instead of admitting that many scholars reject the eyewitness authorship and early dating of the Gospels due to an objective difference of opinion on the evidence, they create the canard that these scholars are working from a bias, thereby negatively influencing lay conservative Christians, inhibiting them from investigating the position of “biased” scholars. Let people read both sides of this issue and decide from themselves. Please stop ‘poisoning the well”.
Gary, we must not be reading the same authors. If you’re reading the same authors I am their bias against the supernatural literally drips off the page. It depends mightily on how you define “Christian.” Because these scholars reject not just the traditional authorship and dating of the gospels but anything supernatural in them.
If all most of these scholars did was quibble over authorship and dating I’d have no issue with them. Because as I posted last wk, the issue of who/when the gospels were written isn’t really as important as what they say about Jesus. But for many of these scholars questioning the traditional dates/authorship is simply a first step in their attempts to deconstruct orthodox Christianity.
The 18th and 19th century Jesus scholars like Reimarus, Jefferson, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Renan, Feuerbach, Wrede, etc. were good Unitarians and deists who rejected claims of the supernatural. They believed vaguely in some kind of God “out there,” but not one who would deign to bother himself with what happens on earth, and certainly not one who would perform miracles. They liked Jesus, and his pithy moral aphorisms, but not miracles, the Trinity, the Apostle Paul or Christianity. It was the Unitarian Thomas Jefferson who in his 1808 *Jefferson Bible* took the KJV and Greek NTs and literally cut out everything but the gospels, then cut out everything miraculous from the gospels so that he was left with only the teachings of Jesus.
Thus, as Schweitzer concluded in his *The Quest of the Historical Jesus,* at the end of their research these 18th and 19th c. scholars all came away with a Jesus who looked remarkably like themselves.
And you’re probably old enough to be familiar with the very liberal Jesus Seminar Fellows from the 1980s and 90s, who were on a quest to separate the historical Jesus from Christ of faith, which they insisted were incompatible, and famously concluded that only 18% of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels were actually spoken by him. Scholars like Jesus Seminar chair and co-founder Robert Funk, a former fundamentalist, don’t believe in a personal, supernatural God distinct from human beings, less still that Jesus of Nazareth was the human incarnation of that God. Other of the Fellows like the former RCC monk John Dominic Crossan, liberal Lutheran Marcus Borg, and liberal Archbishop John Shelby Spong, ECUSA, seem to believe in some kind of god or God but are on the record as being extremely vague as to just exactly “who” or “what” this “god” is. They certainly, like their co-fellow Funk reject the tenets of conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism when it comes to Jesus, the supernatural, etc.
Thus these scholars are not “Christian” in any traditional sense of that term, nor are they believers in the supernatural by any normal definition of that term, either. They want what Dr. Ben Witherington III refers to as “‘resurrection lite,’ . . . less intellectually filling, still tastes great.” Their prior commitment to a postmodernist worldview in which all truth is relative and miracles are impossible (or at most highly unlikely) necessarily colors their view of Jesus and the NT.
You seem to be laboring under the mistaken idea that simply being an academic scholar automatically makes one immune from prejudice/bias. That isn’t the case at all. Nobody’s totally immune from bias/prejudice. These scholars are not as effective in identifying their own presuppositions, or as with Funk and Crossan, seem fully aware of them, yet don’t regard them as anything to be avoided. Like Schweitzer said of Reimarus, Wrede, etc., the Jesus of Funk, Crosasan, Borg and Spong looks a lot like Funk, Crossan, Borg and Spong.
But don’t simply take my word for it. Read the statements of some of these scholars themselves.
HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS, 1788:
“[It is] evident that Jesus in no way intended to abolish this Jewish religion and introduce a new one in its place . . . From this it follows inevitably that the apostles taught and acted exactly the reverse of what their master had intended, taught, and commanded . . .”
“We are justified in drawing an absolute distinction between the teaching of the Apostles in their writings and what Jesus Himself in His own lifetime proclaimed and thought.”
“That which is absurd and impossible, that which in any other history would be called falsehood, deception, outrage and cruelty, cannot be made reasonable, righteous, and true by the added words: ‘Thus saith the Lord.'”
“It was then clearly not the intention or the object of Jesus to suffer and to die, but to build up a worldly kingdom, and to deliver the Israelites from bondage.”
“In short, I may affirm that one cannot refer to a single quoted prophecy that is not false; or if you would have me speak more mildly, I will only say that they are all ambiguous and doubtful, and are not to be accepted from writers who trifle with things and words.”
ROBERT FUNK, founder and co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, from his “21 Theses for a New Reformation”:
“There is not a personal god out there external to human beings and the material world.”
“It is no longer credible to think of Jesus as divine.”
“Jesus did not rise from the dead, except perhaps in some metaphorical sense.”
“. . . way less than 25% of the words attributed to Jesus were his.”
“This isn’t Jesus bashing . . . We want to liberate Jesus. The only Jesus most people want is the mythic one. They don’t want the real Jesus. They want the one they can worship. The cultic Jesus.”
JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN, former Catholic monk and co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, from *Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography*:
“Augustus came from a miraculous conception by the divine and human conjunction of Apollo and Atia. How does the historian respond to that story? Are there any who take it literally or even bracket its transcendental claims as beyond historical judgment or empirical test? Classical historians, no matter how religious, do not usually do so. That divergence raises an ethical problem for me. Either all such divine conceptions, from Alexander to Augustus and from the Christ to the Buddha, should be accepted literally and miraculously or all of them should be accepted metaphorically and theologically. It is not morally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one’s own story.”
John Dominic Crossan, from *Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus*:
“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people [early Christians] told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
John Dominic Crossan, in a debate with conservative NT scholar and Christian philosopher William L. Craig, when queried as to whether he believes Jesus was divine or not:
“‘Jesus is divine’ is a statement made by Christians. It means that I, the Christian speaking, find God in Jesus. I do not find God somewhere else. Somebody else may find God somewhere else, but I do not. That’s what it means to be a Christian.”
MARCUS BORG, a liberal Lutheran and another Jesus Seminar Fellow:
Marcus Borg, from *Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most*:
“The Bible is a human product: it tells us how our religious ancestors saw things, not how God sees things.”
Marcus Borg, ibid:
“But believing something to be true has nothing to do with whether it is true.”
Marcus Borg, ibid:
“Because modern critical thinking is corrosive of conventional religious beliefs, some Christians reject applying it to the Bible and Christianity. The result is fundamentalism and much of conservative Christianity, which holds that regardless of the claims of modern knowledge, the Bible and Christianity are true—and not just true, but factually true.”
Marcus Borg, from *Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary*:
“When somebody says to me, “I don’t believe in God,” my first response is, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Almost always, it’s the God of supernatural theism.”
“A major task for Christians in the 21st century is grateful and enthusiastic affirmation of religious pluralism. This means accepting a relative status for Christianity, but a relative status as one of the magnificent first-magnitude stars in the constellation of the world’s religions.”
ARCHBISHOP JOHN SHELBY SPONG, a Jesus Seminar Fellow, from *Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile*:
“This point must be heard: the Gospels are first-century narrations based on first-century interpretations. Therefore they are a first-century filtering of the experience of Jesus. They have never been other than that. We must read them today not to discover the literal truth about Jesus, but rather to be led into the Jesus experience they were seeking to convey. That experience always lies behind the distortions, which are inevitable since words are limited. If the Gospels are to be for us revelations of truth, we must enter these texts, go beneath the words, discover the experience that made the words necessary, and in this manner seek the meaning to which the words point. One must never identify the text with the revelation or the messenger with the message. That has been the major error in our two thousand years of Christian history. It is an insight that today is still feared and resisted. But let it be clearly stated, the Gospels are not in any literal sense holy, they are not accurate, and they are not to be confused with reality. They are rather beautiful portraits painted by first-century Jewish artists, designed to point the reader toward that which is in fact holy, accurate, and real. The Gospels represent that stage in the development of the faith story in which ecstatic exclamation begins to be placed into narrative form.”
John Shelby Spong, from “Why We Must Reclaim the Bible from Fundamentalists,” *Huffington Post,* October 13, 2011:
“Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue.”
JOHN SHELBY SPONG, from *Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through Matthew’s Gospel*:
“The Christian story did not drop from heaven fully written. It grew and developed year by year over a period of forty-two to seventy years. That is not what most Christians have been taught to think, but it is factual. Christianity has always been an evolving story. It was never, even in the New Testament, a finished story.”
JOHN SHELBY SPONG, ibid:
“Word of God” or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.”
ELAINE PAGELS, former evangelical Baptist, Jesus Seminar Fellow and Gnostic Christian apologist:
“I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher.”
“I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I’d heard when I was growing up were simply made up – and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out.”
“What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material.”
“There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don’t see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don’t think he would have liked at all.”
“The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition.”
ROBERT M. PRICE, former evangelical and Jesus Seminar Fellow:
“I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith.”
“The Holy Bible. Promoting ignorance and superstition for nearly 2000 years.”
“It is quite likely . . . that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological’Christ of faith’ a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic ‘Uncle Sam”‘figure, but if you could travel . . . back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.”
“In broad outline and in detail, the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels corresponds to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype in which a divine hero’s birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the infant hero escapes attempts to kill him, demonstrates his precocious wisdom already as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as king, then betrayed, losing popular favor, executed, often on a hilltop, and is vindicated and taken up to heaven.”
“My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you’d be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.”
“The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. ‘If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are.’ ‘If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted.’ ‘If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitievely debunked, we can go right on assuming it’s truth.’ No, you can’t.”
Well, this is getting really long so I’ll stop now. My question is, do any of these scholars, all of them also best-selling popular authors, sound like traditional Christians who believe in the supernatural? Do you still really think I and other conservatives are “poisoning the well?”
Pax.
Lee.
Lest you say I’ve mainly cited Seminar Fellows above, here are a few other non-Seminar scholars who aren’t orthodox Christians and are skeptical of all or various elements of orthodox Christian tradition:
Karl Rudolf Bultmann (still wildly popular with online skeptics):
“That God has acted in Jesus Christ is, however, not a fact of past history open to historical verification. That Jesus Christ is the Logos of God can never be proved by the objective investigation of the historian. (That is why I cannot share Wilder’s concern that the actual history of Jesus should be verifiable by the historian, or Wiesner’s concern that it should at least be relatively ascertainable. If Wiesner imagines that by saying, ‘It is not the event of redemption because it is the cross of Christ, but it is the cross of Christ because it is the event of redemption’, I am turning the whole thing upside down, he obviously does not see that this affirmation about the cross of Christ can never be a statement of fact, but only a confession of faith.) Rather, the fact that the New Testament describes the figure and work of Christ in mythological terms is enough to show that if they are the act of redemption they must not be understood in their context of world history. The paradox is just this, that a human figure, Jesus of Nazareth see esp. John 6: 42), and the destiny of that figure — i.e. a human being and his fate, with a recognizable place in world history, and therefore exposed to the objective observation of the historian and intelligible within their context in world history — are not thus apprehended and understood as what they really are, namely, as the act of God, as the eschatological event.
“But this is how Jesus Christ is understood in the New Testament (e.g. Gal. 4:4; John 3:17-19). The only question is whether this understanding is necessarily bound up with the cosmic eschatology in which the New Testament places it — with the exception of the Fourth Gospel, where the cosmic eschatology has already become picture language, and where the eschatological event is seen in the coming of Jesus as the Word, the Word of God which is continually represented in the word of proclamation. But the way for this demythologizing was already paved in the primitive Church with its understanding of itself as the eschatological community, the congregation of the saints. The process was carried a stage further by St. Paul with his conception of the believer as a ‘new creature’, since the old is passed away and the new already come (2 Cor. 5:17). Henceforward faith means to exist eschatologically, to exist in detachment from the world, to have passed over from death unto life (1Cor. 7:29-31; John 5:24; 1 John 4:14). At the same time eschatological existence is possible only in faith; it is not yet realized in sight (2 Cor. 5:7.). That is to say, it is not a worldly phenomenon, but is realized in the new self-understanding which faith imparts. Since it is faith in the crucified and risen Christ, this self-understanding is not an autonomous movement of the human will, but the response to the Word of God, which proclaims the manifestation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Since he is the Word of God, Christ is *ante et extra me*, not, however, as a fact open to objective verification and chronologically datable before me, but as the Christus *pro me*, who encounters me as the Word. The eschatological event, which Christ is, is consequently realized invariably and solely in concreto here and now, where the Word is proclaimed (2 Cor. 6:2; John 5:24) and meets with faith or unbelief (2 Cor. 2:15f.; John 3:18; 9:39).”
(On the historicity of the resurrection): “An historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable.”
“The real Easter faith is faith in the word of preaching which brings illumination. If the event of Easter Day is in any sense an historical event additional to the event of the cross, it is nothing else than the rise of faith in the risen Lord, since it was this faith which led to the apostolic preaching. The resurrection itself is not an event of past history.”
“Contemporary Christian proclamation is faced with the question whether, when it demands faith from men and women, it expects them to acknowledge this mythical world picture from the past. If this is impossible, it has to face the question whether the New Testament proclamation has a truth that is independent of the mythical world picture, in which case it would be the task of theology to demythologize the Christian proclamation.”
Ed P. Sanders, a self-described “liberal, modern, secularized Protestant”:
“That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.”
Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American religious scholar, Sufi Muslim, and TV host:
“As a believer and a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe—for the universe is God. I pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God. I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices. I root my moral choices neither in fear of eternal punishment nor in hope of eternal reward. I recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and respond to everyone and everything as though they were God—because they are. And I understand that the only way I can truly know God is by relying on the only thing I can truly know: myself.”
“Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.”
“Actually, Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans—“everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13)—to what Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21).”
“It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: “today I have begotten you” (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his “first-born son” (Exodus 4:22). But in every case, Son of God is meant as a title, not a description. Paul’s view of Jesus as the literal son of God is without precedence in second Temple Judaism.”
Geza Vermes, former Hungarian Jew, who with his Jewish family was baptized into the Catholic Church and himself ordained to the priesthood but in the 1950s left the priesthood and embraced Reformed Judaism:
“Everyone except the desperately naive knows that the Gospel sources are not strictly historical and postdate the events by decades. The earlier letters of St Paul won’t help as their author never knew, or showed interest in, the Jesus of flesh and blood. The four Gospels, written between some 15 to 55 years after Paul, in the form of biographies, formulate Jesus’s teaching adapted for the needs of the early church.”
“In the course of my research that led to the writing of *Jesus the Jew,* it was impossible not to notice that church tradition tended to attribute the maximum of significance to the honorific titles applied to Jesus by the evangelists. I decided therefore to set up a quasi-scientific experiment. I said to myself: let’s try to establish the correlation between the features of the Jesus portrait of the Gospels and the meaning of the designations such as ‘Messiah’, ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of God’ in the mind of the contemporaries of Jesus.
“To achieve this, we must forget the Greek understanding of the terms by the Gentile readers of the Gospel; get rid of 2,000 years of superimposed Christian interpretation of the New Testament, and switch instead the searchlight on Jesus’s Aramaic-speaking Jewish audience on the shore of the Lake of Galilee. What was the original meaning of the message and what did the original addressees make of it?”
“The gospels tell us two contradictory things – that Jesus was interested only in Jews and that the world was his target. Which one is right? My belief is that the first is something Jesus did say, which has survived in the text, while the other was something that was later attributed to him by gospel writers to suit the needs of an expanding Christian church.”
Well, I’m getting too long again. My point is that being a skeptic if you’re a NT scholar is considered almost *de rigueur* nowadays, certainly if you want as best-seller or an interview in a PBS, THC or TLC Jesus documentary. Otherwise, why are there no THC documentaries about Jesus featuring orthodox, conservative Craig Evans, Michael Bird, Brad Pitre or Ben Witherington III? Instead liberals like former Seminar Fellow John D. Crossan and Elaine Pagels get 15 minutes of onscreen interview time while NT Wright and Craig Blomberg get 5 or 6 minutes of onscreen interview time.
Pax.
Lee.
Hi Lee,
For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that all Protestant scholars have a bias against the supernatural. How do you explain the fact that most Catholic scholars AND The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops doubt the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels? Do you really want to assert that CATHOLICS (you know, those people who believe that Jesus’ mother appears all over the world to the faithful; have shrines all over the world dedicated to miracle healings; nominate people as saints due to their alleged miracles) have a bias against the supernatural??
I’ve got to say, Gary, your arguments are baffling. I don’t think Lee has said ALL Protestant scholars have a bias against the supernatural. Some, in fact, many do…but so what? And what does that have to do with the issue of the gospels containing eyewitness information?
Lee is challenging my assertion that the reason that most scholars doubt the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels is due to the evidence and not due to a bias against the supernatural. As I read Lee’s last two comments, he seems to be wanting to demonstrate that the majority position on the authorship of the Gospels IS due to a bias. He has presented statements by several prominent Protestant scholars in an attempt to prove his point.
So instead of arguing with him about the majority position among all scholars, or even among most Protestant scholars, i am asking him to focus solely on Roman Catholic scholars. Why do most Roman Catholic scholars AND Roman Catholic bishops doubt the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels?
Clarification: I am NOT claiming that most scholars doubt that some eyewitness information is contained in the Gospels. I am only discussing authorship.